If morality is real and has causal power, could science detect the moment the "moral ontology" causes a measurable effect on the physical world? [closed]

Question

If morality is real in an objective manner, then it must exist ontologically "somewhere" and "somehow."

Moreover, this "moral ontology" must also have causal power, because in this physical world, there are beings (like us humans) who actively discuss and act upon moral principles. For morality to be real ontologically and have real effects on the physical world, it must interact with it in some measurable way. Therefore, it should be possible for science, particularly physics, to study when, where, and how this moral ontology exerts its influence on physical reality.

For example, if a human gives a speech about morality, the speech is a physical event (sound waves in the air) that could, in principle, be traced back to prior physical causes. At some point in this causal chain, if morality is indeed objective, we should encounter a point where this "moral ontology" intervenes and causes a tangible effect in physical reality.

Without such an interaction, the notion of an objective morality becomes questionable, as it would imply that morality, while real, has no measurable or observable impact on the world. This would challenge the very idea of morality as an objective force or aspect of reality that governs or guides human actions in any meaningful way.

If the reasoning above holds, wouldn't it follow that science should be able to study whether this "moral ontology" has measurable physical effects? Could physics, for instance, eventually discover a kind of "moral force" that produces measurable effects on the brain under specific conditions, perhaps even formalizable in mathematical terms?

Answer 1

Yes, but...

Chairs are real, and yet there is no "chair force" that produces measurable effects on the universe.

To choose something slightly less tangible, the federal interest rate is real, and yet there is no "federal interest rate force."

Most things that are real, are not represented as fundamental forces of the universe. Most things are instead patterns of existing stuff. Chairs do have causal effects on the universe, and the federal interest rate does, too. But these effects are nothing more than the effects of the more fundamental stuff they are made up of. The chairs are not ontologically privileged.

So it is plausible that morality could have effects on the universe, and also that morality is a pattern or arrangement of other simpler stuff, and the effects of morality are nothing more than the effects of the other simpler stuff.

What patterns could morality be made up of? Well: we can speak of morally good and bad acts. If we pick some arbitrary standard for what we call "good" and "bad," then the morally good acts and morally bad acts become definite, distinct sets. The morally good acts do have effects on the universe, and the morally bad acts also have effects on the universe, different ones. So this is how morality could have causal effects on the universe.

The real question is the arbitrariness of the standard. Must the standard be fully arbitrary, or is there some particular standard that wise-enough people might eventually agree on?

"Good" and "bad" have the nature of preferences: what we call good, we prefer, and what we call bad, we do not prefer. But often we may have a preference initially, and then later events and the power of hindsight show us that we were wrong to have that preference. What we thought good, we realize with the wisdom of hindsight, was not good.

If we take learning and hindsight to the theoretical maximum, what would we in the end call good, and what would we in the end call bad? This could be a non-arbitrary basis for moral goodness and badness.

Answer 2

You ask for the mechanism how moral convictions shape our behaviour.

1. The question does not restrict to moral convictions, it is analogous for religious or political convictions etc. It is the question for the mechanism which triggers our bodily actions or omission of action according to our convictions.

   You ask for the bridge between the moral level and the physical level. We can experience the will resulting from our convictions and we can observe the behaviour. But the question is how to bridge the phenomenological level and the neurobiological level, i.e. to naturalize our moral convictions which are action guiding. In short:

The search for the neuronal correlate of morality.

2. An early investigation of such convictions is due to Sigmund Freud. He called “superego” the sum of all cultural rules we take over during the early education from our parents. These rules also include basic rules of morality. These rules must be incorporated in our memory similarly like any personal experience which determines our behaviour. And neuronal plasticity may change them at later time.

3. One century ago Freud could not support his hypotheses by results from neuroscience.

   IMO action guiding convictions are coded by specific mental processes, in specific areas of the brain, and with a specific temporal pattern and characteristic feed-back loops.

Hence I recommend to address the OP’s question to a forum on neuroscience, not to a philosophical forum.

Answer 3

A factoid about which there is a surprising amount of agreement,^E with respect to ethics, is the proposition of supervenience in ethics. For an introductory slogan:

• A supervenes on B if and only if A is different only when B is different.

Ethics-wise:

... to adapt R. M. Hare’s canonical example (1952, §5.2), if I mentioned to you that one possible act was right, and another wrong,^🏰 despite these acts being exactly alike in all other respects, your initial reaction would be puzzlement, and if I persisted in my view upon interrogation, you might start to worry that I was simply confused or misusing words.

Your question, then, can be interpreted as asking about the supervenience of the physical on the ethical: does this ever happen? Or would it be required to happen, to have the kind of vividly realistic moral ontology you're asking about?

Historically, the prime example of this notion is "ought implies can" (see the PhilPapers list of papers having to do with this topic).^𝕬 In Kant's hands, this precept has the metaphysical "oomph" that is enough to compromise the thesis of universal empirical determinism, such as to say that something can be recognized as possible not because antecedent empirical conditions make it so, but on account of our moral ontology:

Suppose some one asserts of his lustful appetite that, when the desired object and the opportunity are present, it is quite irresistible. [Ask him] if a gallows were erected before the house where he finds this opportunity, in order that he should be hanged thereon immediately after the gratification of his lust, whether he could not then control his passion; we need not be long in doubt what he would reply. Ask him, however: if his sovereign ordered him, on pain of the same immediate execution, to bear false witness against an honourable man, whom the prince might wish to destroy under a plausible pretext, would he consider it possible in that case to overcome his love of life, however great it may be. He would perhaps not venture to affirm whether he would do so or not, but he must unhesitatingly admit that it is possible to do so. He judges, therefore, that he can do a certain thing because he is conscious that he ought, and he recognizes that he is free—a fact which but for the moral law he would never have known.

If you mix this with a modal-epistemology claim that we can actually perceive possibilities, then you might have an example of a perceptible sample of your proposed moral ontology. (Note: if your modal epistemology is coming all the way from Kant, however, this won't do: for Kant did not think that we could blatantly "perceive" modal predicates in such a manner, at least not on my reading of him.)

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^EThere is much less agreement when it comes to the notion of "moral explanations." But the topic is relevant to your inquiry, and so as they say in the linked-to SEP entry:

... [It is claimed that] sometimes a moral truth is necessary for the best explanation of a non-moral fact (cf. Sturgeon 1985). Hitler’s vices are sometimes cited to explain his atrocities. Slavery’s injustice has been said to explain its demise. And the fact that everyone agrees that it is morally wrong to torture babies just to get sexual pleasure might be best explained by the fact that this common belief is true.

^🏰One might object that Hare chose his divergence on the basis of too harsh a contrast, that between right and wrong, which are opposites. It seems strange to think that a normal object could sustain this contrariety even if the issue of supervenience has not arisen. But suppose instead that you were told of two tokens t of some action-type that t₁ was good and t₂ was neutral, or t₁ was optional but not indifferent whereas t₂ was just indifferent, etc. Arguably, these cases of non-supervenience should offend our intuitions less than the right-vs.-wrong kind of case would.

^𝕬In Anselm's hands, "ought implies can" is taken to be so powerful that it can adjust possibilities having to do with the divine nature itself (see his Wherefore the God-man, usually Cur Deus Homo). Specifically, Anselm thinks OiC allows us to logically-consistently say that there could be, because there should be, a personal being who somehow "has" two radically separate natures (a mortal and an eternal one). Granted, this has next to nothing to do with scientifically detecting the impact of a robust moral ontology, on the human world, since one could not scientifically decide whether some human being ever "had" the divine nature, via their personhood, "on the side" (indeed, one will probably never scientifically perceive such a nature).

Answer 4

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penelope_Maddy

Maddy's early work, culminating in Realism in Mathematics, defended Kurt Gödel's position that mathematics is a true description of a mind-independent realm that we can access through our intuition. However, she suggested that some mathematical entities are in fact concrete, unlike, notably, Gödel, who assumed all mathematical objects are abstract. She suggested that sets can be causally efficacious, and in fact share all the causal and spatiotemporal properties of their elements. Thus, when one sees three cups on a table, one also sees the set. She used contemporary work in cognitive science and psychology to support this position, pointing out that just as at a certain age we begin to see objects rather than mere sense perceptions, there is also a certain age at which we begin to see sets rather than just objects.

However, it is not a trvial deduction from real to "causally effacious", nor can we be certian that an absence of moral entities from our best scientific theories means moral properties do not really exist.

Answer 5

Re. "it should be possible for science ... to study when, where, and how this moral ontology exerts its influence on physical reality."

I would suggest game theory plays a role here. In the simple game of trust

https://www.clearerthinking.org/post/evolution-of-trust-game

depending on conditions of, for example, effectiveness of communication, various mutual behaviours such as 'copycat', 'cheat' or 'always cooperate' prove to be evolutionarily successful. So different golden rules apply depending on conditions.

Answer 6

I'd like to expand causative's good answer "the chairs are not ontologically privileged" by adding explicitly: Neither is morality.

My viewpoint is a decidedly materialistic one: Yes, everything, including our mental states, including our morality, is matter. The more interesting things are specifically patterns imprinted on matter, often replicating ones. "Living" beings (bacteria, humans) are prime examples for that. The stuff we are made of is famously uninteresting, at least after you burn it (before, some of the proteins etc. are interesting and precious). The interesting thing about us is how that stuff is organized. This specific, individual organization is also what constitutes our identity: After all, most of what we are made of is replaced every couple of years. Our identity is not based on what we are made of; it is based on how we are made up. The substrate (carbon chains) may not be really that important, beyond its capability to form complex patterns. It is conceivable that life develops based on a silicone chemistry, or as patterns in computers.

Morality, then, is a specific sub-pattern within the patterns that make up us humans; some might say, it is a "meme", a "mental gene". It evolves, is selected, and is reproduced.

Because morality is a specific "swirl" in the matter that makes us up there is no need to invent a step to make it have an effect in the material world (and vice versa!): It is already a part of it, as are all of our emotions and thoughts.